The Opera Group | Productions

CANDIDE

2003

music by Leonard Bernstein
adapted from Voltaire by Hugh Wheeler & Richard Wilbur. New version by John Caird.

The innocent young bastard Candide is expelled from home, drafted into the Bulgarian army, brought before the Spanish Inquisition, swindled out of a Mexican fortune, shipwrecked on a desert island, and separated time and again from his true love Cunegonde.

Candide’s whistle-stop tour is an absurdly fast moving catalogue of rapes and robberies in a world of political and religious intolerance. Will the young hero’s faith in the goodness of the world survive the cruelties that he must endure?

Voltaire’s towering work of comic and philosophical genius is turned by Bernstein into the most entertaining of all possible nights out. Not quite an opera, nor exactly an operetta or musical, Candide is quite simply fantastic theatre.

Musical Director Patrick Bailey
Director John Fulljames
Designer Alex Lowde
Lighting Oliver Fenwick